By Kemo Cham
There has been an outpouring of anger and consternation in the southern district of Pujehun where activists are calling for investigation into the death of a patient at the Government Hospital due to “negligence.”
Mammie Sesay, 19, a pregnant woman in labor, reportedly died after she was allegedly abandoned by the hospital staff even though she had just undergone surgery.
The incident which happened on Sunday, December 1, has rekindled longstanding concerns over a culture of lethargy and unprofessionalism among healthcare providers in Sierra Leone, which campaigners say is responsible for the death of many people.
The Civil Society Forum (CSF) of Pujehun said its preliminary findings revealed that most of the staff of the facility had gone to participate in the World AIDS Day commemoration, leaving just a few workers to attend to emergency cases.
“The Executive of the CSF was reliably informed that the Hospital was completely deserted by health staff…which directly resulted in the death of this patient,” the organization said in a statement signed by its Secretary, Julius George Kamara, who is also a paralegal with the Sierra Leone Legal AID Board.
CSF Pujehun said the nurse who was in charge of the female ward, decided to abandon her post after her colleague who was supposed to take over duty from her didn’t turn up, despite waiting for hours after the end of her work schedule.
“From our own investigations, the CSF team [was] made to understand that the nurse at the Female Ward during the day reached her off-duty hour in the evening and waited for her colleagues to come and take over [from] her for the night shift, but they never showed up, hence she left without waiting further and during her absence and without night staff on duty, the condition of the patient deteriorated and she died,” the statement added.
According to the organization, a combination of factors pointing to poor management was responsible for the incident, including poor communication among staff, negligence and lack of monitoring by the top management of the District Government Hospital.
“The CSF-Pujehun District firmly believes that low and/or no interest in the area of health services by some public servants (nurses-on-duty) to patients has negative effects on direct beneficiaries and this one is a perfect example,” it stressed.
The campaigners want the relevant authorities to mount investigation and “speedily” publish the findings about the incident. They also called on the top management to scale up “effective and constructive” monitoring in all the wards in the facility.
Many believe unprofessionalism within the country’s healthcare system is rampant, and attribute this to be the cause of deaths of many patients. The complaints include extortion and disrespect for patients.
Pujehun Government hospital has been cited as one of such hospitals with a notable case in 2016 when a nurse reportedly refused to attend to a patient because the family did not have money to buy medicine from her. The patient eventually died.
Observers say there have been numerous complaints of nurses abandoning the health facility, leaving patients waiting endlessly.
Medical Superintendent of the Pujehun Government Hospital, Dr. Hoody Lymon, dismissed the allegations of the activists regarding the current situation. He told Politico on Tuesday that he was completing his report on the December 1 incident for onward submission to his superiors.
And although he didn’t want to comment on the issue until his report was completed, he noted that his preliminary findings revealed that all the allegations from the CSOs were “unfounded”, stressing that the incident didn’t happen the way they portrayed it.
“As far I am concerned, those allegations are unfounded,” he said, noting that the issue had been politicized.
“The civil society people are very ignorant about the issue. They have no knowledge about it. For you to make such claims you need to have knowledge about hospital operations,” Lymon said on a telephone interview from Pujehun.
Mr. Sallia Massaquoi, husband of the deceased woman, who was by her bedside until her death, narrated what happened on the phone from his village of Bumpeh Perri.
Massaquoi said only two nurses were in the hospital when they arrived by ambulance after a journey lasting one hour from Bumpe Perri. He said the two nurses were shuttling between the female ward where his wife was admitted and another ward, and that he would call them whenever his wife needed their attention. He said that at one point he had to call the nurses when the first of two bags of intravenous drips administered on her got finished.
A minute’s long video footage of the patient, shared on social media over the weekend, showed her being restrained by a family member, as she struggled in pain.
The aggrieved widower, Massaquoi, said he had to pay up to Le80, 000 after the nurses demanded payment for surgery, cleaning the labor room and for sanitary pads.
Although he believes it’s “God’s time” that his wife died, Massaquoi said “after the operation she was talking well. It took three hours before there was a complication and she eventually died”.
“I don’t know what happened inside the ward because they asked us out after they had called the doctor when my wife’s situation worsened.”
A letter of query leaked on social media indicated that the hospital management has already subjected two female nurses to investigation over the incident.
In the letter dated December 2, Theresa Fortune, a State Registered Nurse and Fatmata B. Swaray, a nursing Aid, were ordered to provide explanation for abandoning their duty post and leaving patients unattended, leading to the demise of one of them.
According to the letter, the two had 24 hours to address their responses to the District Human Resource Assistant Office attached to the hospital.
Copyright © 2019 Politico Online
